ATLANTA —This 2014-15 NBA season has been defined by so much
greatness: Steph Curry's wonderful, joyful MVP season. James Harden's
marked improvement. Anthony Davis' scary-good emergence. Jimmy Butler's
unforeseen growth. Russell Westbrook's triple-double spree. John Wall,
Klay Thompson, Blake Griffin, Draymond Green, Kawhi Leonard. The list is
longer, too, as a new generation of stars finds its place in the
league.
But as much as that has been the case, injuries all season
long – and now in particular during the playoffs – have dimmed the tone
of fantastic performances.
The latest: Atlanta Hawks forward
DeMarre Carroll who sustained a sprained left knee with 4:59 remaining
left in the fourth quarter of Cleveland's 97-89 victory over Atlanta
Wednesday in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals.
Game 2 is
Friday in Atlanta, and Carroll, who left Philips Arena on crutches, is
expected to undergo an MRI on Thursday to determine the extent of his
injury.

If
he misses any time, Atlanta's chances of advancing to the NBA Finals
decrease. Carroll is the Hawks' leading scorer in the playoffs and he is
the team's best perimeter defender. He has morphed into a two-way
player who is vital to Atlanta's success.
"He's such a great
teammate. Everybody's just concerned for DeMarre, and I'm hoping that
he's healthy and ready to help us as soon as possible," Hawks coach Mike
Budenholzer said. "That's how we feel about each of our teammates, each
of our players. I know there's that same feeling for DeMarre, and it's
the playoffs. So everybody would like him to come through this as
healthy as possible."
Think about just these injuries in the
playoffs: Kevin Love is out for the season with a shoulder injury); Wall
missed a portion of the Hawks series with five non-displaced fractures
in his left hand; Chris Paul missed games against Houston with a bad
hamstring; Mike Conley needed facial fracture surgery; Kyrie Irving is
obviously hampered by a strained right foot and tendinitis in his left
knee; Pau Gasol missed two games against the Cavaliers with a hamstring
injury; Dallas Chandler Parsons couldn't get through the playoffs.
That's
just the playoffs and doesn't include regular-season injuries or
ailments to Derrick Rose, Kevin Durant, Westbrook, Chris Bosh, Kobe
Bryant, Wesley Matthews, Patrick Beverley, Donatas Motiejunas and Thabo
Sefolosha who sustained a broken fibula and ligament damage in an
altercation with New York police.

Atlanta
Hawks forward DeMarre Carroll (5) is helped off the court after an
apparent injury as Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James (23) talks
with him during the fourth quarter of game one of the Eastern Conference
Finals of the NBA Playoffs against the Cleveland Cavaliers at Philips
Arena. Cleveland won 97-89. (Photo: Brett Davis, USA TODAY Sports)

The
Cavs are without Love, Anderson Varejao and a limited Irving, who
played just 27 minutes in Game 1 – 3:05 in the fourth quarter and wasn't
on the floor in the final 8:39.
"This is the moment he's been
waiting for," LeBron James said. "This is the biggest stage. Physically,
he's not capable of doing what we all know he's capable of doing. … .
For me, that's my role at that point, to let him know when he's on the
floor, no matter what he's going through, we need him to be aggressive,
as aggressive as he can be with the injury, and not worry about things
that he cannot control; only worry about the things that he can
control."

And
now the Hawks could be without Carroll. For comparison, Houston center
Dwight Howard, who also has a sprained knee, is listed as questionable
for Thursday's Game 2 against Golden State.
"Somebody has to step
up," Hawks guard Jeff Teague said. "DeMarre's been our glue guy all
year, been playing well in the playoffs, been our best player in the
past couple of series. Hopefully, he can get back healthy soon, but one
of the guys in there has to step up."
Budenholzer said reserve Kent Bazemore would likely receive more playing time if Carroll had to sit out.
We'll see what we learn tomorrow and figure out what gives us our best chance," Budenholzer said.
The
results of Carroll's MRI loom large. Even with Carroll on the floor,
Atlanta had trouble defending James, who was intent on posting up and
using his size advantage. James took just one three-point attempt and
all but eight of his 26 attempts were in the paint. He finished with a
game-high 31 points and also had eight rebounds and six assists. He now
has 52 playoff games with at least 30 points, five assists and five
rebounds – more than any other player in NBA history.
Even before
Carroll left Game 1 with the injury, Cleveland was on its way to a road
win and a quick steal of home-court advantage in the series opener.
The
Cavs tightened their defense in the second half, shutting down
Atlanta's three-point shooting and Teague's penetration, and J.R. Smith
did what J.R. Smith does best: score ruthlessly.

Smith
had a playoff career-high 28 points, making 10-for-16 shots, including
8-for-12 three-pointers. During a 22-4 Cavs run stretching from the
third quarter to fourth quarter, Smith had 17 of those points – 15
coming on three-pointers.
"Once I start shooting, whether I make or miss, everybody tells me to keep shooting," Smith said.
He even had a line that cracked up James.
"It's kind of hard hitting the shots I was hitting to try and pass the ball, but you've got to figure out a way," Smith said.
His
eight three-pointers is the most for a Cavs player in the playoffs, and
he also had eight rebounds, prompting Cavs coach David Blatt to say,
"I'd love to know when the last time a guy made guy made eight threes
and got eight rebounds."
Since 1985, it's only happened three
other times in the playoffs, according to basketball-reference.com: Klay
Thompson in 2013, Jason Richardson in 2010 and Gary Payton in 1997.
Love and Harden were the only two players to do it during the 2014-15
regular season.
"When he gets hot, he gets smoking hot. He was
terrific," Blatt said. "Probably overlooked in his great shooting
performance was the fact that he defended as well as he did and he got
eight rebounds."
So now, the Hawks have work to do with or without
Carroll. He was driving for a layup when he planted his left foot and
the leg didn't give. He went down in obvious pain.
As Hawks players and training staff helped Carroll off the court, James walked over and tapped him on the head.
"At
the end of the day, we're all a brotherhood," James said. "NBA is a
brotherhood, and you never want anyone to get injured, even in combat.
So that's what went through my mind. Obviously, I love competing versus
anybody who loves to compete as well. He's one of those guys that was
competing throughout the night, throughout the postseason. I'm not sure
the severity of the injury right now. But I hope he has a recovery,
whatever it is. You just don't want anybody to get hurt like that."
That brotherhood has been special – and injured – this season.

If you happen to trade bonds for a living, it is entirely understandable if you are feeling a little anxious these days.

Prices
for United States Treasuries, German bunds and most other securities on
the multitrillion dollar global bond market have been exceptionally
volatile in the last couple of months. In this environment, someone who
buys and sells them for a living could lose a fortune by taking an
ill-timed bathroom break.

But
what happens in bonds matters for the rest of us, too. Bond prices
translate into the price to borrow money for practically every family
and business on earth, which, in turn, determines savings and investment
patterns. In the latest bout of volatility, long-term interest rates in
the United States have climbed by almost 0.4 percentage points. Since
the interest rate is in an inverse relationship to a bond’s price, the
value of bond investors’ portfolios has taken a hit.

And
that helps explain why there has been so much hand-wringing over the
ups and downs of the market in the last few weeks, as my colleague Peter
Eavis has reported.

Photo

Frank Masiello, a specialist trader, at work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.Credit
Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Bankers
are warning that tighter regulations may preclude them from playing
their traditional role of stepping in to buffer the ups and downs of
markets. Regulators worry that asset managers are engaging in herd
behavior that will fuel an unnecessary roller coaster in markets. And
there is plenty of worry out there that years of central bank
interventionism have dulled the proper functioning of markets.

These
arguments all have merit, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. And when
you look closely at what has been happening with bond prices, what it
says about the economy is pretty much benign. What it says about how
some of the markets at the core of the global financial system are
working is far scarier.

So first, what does the shift mean for the economy?

Ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds
were yielding 2.26 percent Wednesday, up from 1.87 percent in late
March; those higher rates have also rippled through to higher mortgage
rates and corporate borrowing costs. Some international long-term
interest rates, particularly in Germany, have climbed steeply. Some
economists are even raising the possibility that a generation-long shift toward ever-lower global interest rates might have finally run its course.

Not
so fast. Interest rates are still extraordinarily low by any historical
standard and still below where they were in the fall of 2014. Viewed in
a longer time horizon, it looks as if the bond boom of late 2014 and
the start of 2015 went too far and is now partly reversing, not that
some new trend of higher rates is taking hold.

The
factors that fueled those low rates to begin with — very low global
inflation, vast pools of global savings looking for a place to be
parked, central banks trying to use easy-money policies to restore
growth — have changed after all.

You
don’t have to believe there is an epochal shift going on, only modest
changes in the last couple of months that can justify the move.

It
looks as if higher rates are coming. The Federal Reserve appears
relatively committed to its plans to raise short-term interest rates
sometime this year. Oil prices have risen after falling to recent lows
over the winter, so inflation should be a bit higher than it had seemed
in February. And the dollar has weakened on currency markets, which also
signals higher inflation.

Those all point to higher bond yields, and that’s exactly what we’ve gotten, with no major mystery.

Bond Yields Increasing, Along With Volatility

What
is more of a mystery is why we’ve seen such abrupt turns in a market
that historically has been slow-moving and not prone to overreactions.

Usually
it’s the stock market that is always rising and falling for reasons
that are hard to explain (or justify). The bond market, dominated by
sophisticated, grown-up institutions like pensions and sovereign wealth funds as opposed to individual investors, has traditionally seemed less prone to irrational jitters.

In
other words, there are perfectly plausible, fundamental reasons the
10-year Treasury yield should be 2.26 percent right now. But reasons it
should have risen by half a percentage point since the start of
February, with many jaw-dropping days in between? They are hard to
fathom when nothing terribly dramatic about the economy or policy
outlook has changed since then.

And
that’s where we get to those explanations mentioned above involving the
technical details of the bond market: things like banks being
restricted from trading operations by new regulations, and asset
managers crowding in and out of trades.

We’re
in a world where the supply of bonds is relatively fixed. It has always
been true that governments don’t quickly adjust their deficit spending
plans based on a move in rates. But in a normal state of affairs when
prices rise, private bondholders are more willing to sell, helping
restrain the size of swings.

But now global central banks, having bought trillions of dollars’ worth of bonds in executing their quantitative easing
programs, are not inclined to exploit price moves opportunistically.
Rather, they are moving glacially, based on economic fundamentals, and
with lots of advance communication on their intentions.

Count
other institutions that hold bonds as insurance against economic
catastrophe — not because they are hoping for meaningful return — and
the number of players in the market responding to prices in an
economically rational way is small.

This is a long way of explaining the common term of art in markets: There is less liquidity than there once was.

One
result is big swings based on small pieces of information, as the
buffers that would normally sell into price increases and buy into price
drops are nowhere to be found.

And
there’s not much reason to think that the forces driving this — the
expansive role of central banks in the market, the structures of banks
and asset managers and so on — are going to change anytime soon.

In other words, bond traders may just want to get used to postponing those perilous bathroom breaks.